AI promised efficiency. Instead, it's making us work harder

https://afterburnout.co/p/ai-promised-to-make-us-more-efficient

by mooreds • 12 months ago

173 148 12 months ago

ctoth• 12 months ago

Bit of a dunk but ... It must have saved you what ever time you were going to spend on this article because I detect a bunch of LLMisms and very little content.

I'm not sure that Claude saves me time -- I just spent my weekend working on a Claude Code Audio hook with Claude which I obviously wouldn't have worked on elsewise, and that's hardly the gardening I intended to do ... but man it was fun and now my CC sessions are a lot easier to track by ear!

Bukhmanizer• 12 months ago

I think a lot of people would disagree with this article on HN, but I’ve yet to see too many people say it’s made their coworkers more productive. That is, do people feel like they’re getting better, more reviewable PRs?

Personally, I’ve been seeing the number of changes for a PR starting to reach into the mid-hundreds now. And fundamentally the developers who make them don’t understand how they work. They often think they do, but then I’ll ask them something about the design and they’ll reply: “IDK Claude did that.”

By no means am I down on AI, but I think proper procedures need to be put into place unless we want a giant bomb in our code base.

aantix• 12 months ago

I don't think "IDK Claude did that" is a valid excuse. Immediate rejection.

AI may be multi-threaded, but there's still a human, global interpreter lock in place. :D

If you put the code up for review, regardless of the source, you should fundamentally understand how it works.

This raises a broader point about AI and productivity: while AI promises parallelism, there's still the human in the middle who is responsible for the code.

The promise of "parallelism" is overstated.

100's of PRs should not be trusted. Or at least not without the c-suite understanding such risks. Maybe you're a small startup looking to get out the door as quickly as possible, so.. YOLO.

But it's going to be a hot mess. A "clean up in aisle nine" level mess.

ryandrake• 12 months ago

It's insane that any company would just be OK with "IDK Claude did that" any more than a 2010 version of that company would be OK with "IDK I copy pasted from StackOverflow." Have engineering managers actually drank this Kool-aid to the point where they're actually OK with their direct reports just chucking PRs over the wall that they don't even understand?

SoftTalker3• 12 months ago

As someone who doesn't use AI for writing code, why can't you just ask Claude to write up an explanation of each change for code review? Then at least you can look at whether the explanation seems sane.

NegativeLatency• 12 months ago

I don't think "IDK Claude did that" is a valid excuse.

It's not, and yet I have seen that offered as an excuse several times.

f1shy2• 12 months ago

At least I would not accept from my team. Is borderline infuriating. And I would promptly insinuate, if that is the answer, next time I do not need you, I will ask directly Claude, you can stay home!

corytheboyd2• 12 months ago

The promise of "parallelism" is overstated.

100% my takeaway after trying to parallelize using worktrees. While Claude has no problem managing more than one context instance, I sure as hell do. It’s exhausting, to the point of slowing me down.

ToucanLoucan• 12 months ago

If you put the code up for review, regardless of the source, you should fundamentally understand how it works.

Inb4 the chorus of whining from AI hypists accusing you of being an coastal elitist intellectual jerk for daring to ask that they might want to LEARN something.

I am so over this anti-intellectual garbage. It's gotten to such a ridiculous place in our society and is literally going to get tons of people killed.

j-bos3• 12 months ago

I don't think "IDK Claude did that" is a valid excuse. Immediate rejection.

I strongly agree, however manager^x do not and want see report the massive "productivity" gains.

kibwen• 12 months ago

I don't think "IDK Claude did that" is a valid excuse. Immediate rejection.

That will work, but only until the people filing these PRs go crying to their managers that you refuse to merge any of their code, at which point you'll be given a stern reprimand from your betters to stop being so picky. Have fun vibe-reviewing.

pkdpic• 12 months ago

Yeah in a perfect world I absolutely agree. But the reality I'm observing is that everything continues to always be behind schedule (not a new phenomena) and if anything expectations from project leads / management are just getting less realistic leaving Jr devs in even more of a position of "no time to be curious or learn deeply just get it done" and teamleads reviewing PRs in a maybe even worse position of "no time to get into a deep review / mentorship session just figure out if it breaks anything or not". And ultimately clients are still just living in fantasy land in terms of expectations both in terms of build out time for basic features / patches and also how much AI razzle-dazzle they expect for new project proposals.

Nothing can move fast enough to keep up with these hype-fueled TED talk expectations all the way up the chain.

I don't know if there's any solution and I'm sure it's not like this everywhere but I'm also sure I'm not alone. At this point I'm just trying to keep my feet wet on "AI" related projects until the hype dust settles so I can reassess what this industry even is anymore. Maybe it's not too late to get a single subject credential and go teach math or finger painting or something.

throwawaysleep4• 12 months ago

A lot depends heavily on how you define productive.

At one of my jobs, the PRs are far less reviewable, but now the devs write tests when they didn’t used to bother. I’ve always viewed reviewing PRs as work without recognition, so I never did much of it anyway, but but now that there are passing tests, I often approve without more than a cursory skim.

So yes, it has made their work more productive for me to get off my plane.

skydhash• 12 months ago

But are the test actually useful? You can have a test suite that is actually harmful if it’s not ensuring business rules or domain correctness. Anything else makes for a brittle dev ecosystem.

teiferer2• 12 months ago

Thanks for this take. It perfectly illustrates the productivity illusion.

Mostly blindly approving PRs mainly because they now contain some form of equally AI-generated tests is exactly the producticity fallacy that's the issue here.

whstl• 12 months ago

That is, do people feel like they’re getting better, more reviewable PRs?

No, like you I’m getting more PRs that are less reviewable.

It multiplies what you’re capable of. So you’ll get a LOT of low quality code from devs who aren’t much into quality.

alexander2002• 12 months ago

AI is like a giant calculator you need a formula to make it work for your usecase

asciii• 12 months ago

That's a great analogy. I recently read about integrating AI similar to the use of calculators in math class -- learn how to do the basic operations first +,-,/,* and then use calculator to scale so you get some theoretical grounding

SamInTheShell• 12 months ago

Accurate. It's autocomplete on steroids.

liveoneggs2• 12 months ago

Calculators are mostly deterministic and AI is explicitly not.

When computers give different answers to the same questions it's a fundamental shift in how we work with them.

uludag• 12 months ago

I've been at the same company both before and after the AI revolution. I've felt something similar. People seem to be more detached, more aloof in their work. I feel like we're discussing our code less and are less able to have coherent big-picture plans concerning the code at-large.

vouaobrasil10• 12 months ago

The ultimate purpose of AI is indeed to remove cognitive autonomy. Little pieces here and there may seem empowering, but added all up, it pretty much takes control away from people.

qsort• 12 months ago

It's extremely hard to measure productivity correctly and self-reports are worthless. I don't think AI tools are a net negative in the average case (people are definitely indexing too much on that goddamn METR article) but "i'm 10x more productive, source trust me bro" is equally nonsense.

Using AI tooling means, at least in part, betting on the future.

didericis2• 12 months ago

Using AI tooling means, at least in part, betting on the future.

It means betting on a particular LLM centric vision of the future.

I’m still agnostic on that. I think LLMs allow for the creation of a lot of one off scripts and things for people that wouldn’t otherwise be coding, but I have yet to be convinced that more AI usage in a sufficiently senior software development team is more valuable than the traditional way of doing things.

I think there’s a fundamental necessity for a human to articulate what a given piece of software should do with a high level of specificity that can’t ever be avoided. The best you can do is piggy back off of higher level language and abstractions that guess what the specifics should be, but I don’t think it’s realistic to think all combinations of all business logic and ui can be boiled down to common patterns that an LLM could infer. And even if that were true, people get bored/like novelty enough that they’ll always want new human created stuff to shove into the training set.

teiferer2• 12 months ago

"i'm 10x more productive, source trust me bro"

Yet HN has what feels like one blog post or article to that effect every day. Some senior person describing their workflow, arguing that this makes them 10x of before.

It's refreshing to get the other perspective now and then.

pfisherman2• 12 months ago

Personally, I’ve been seeing the number of changes for a PR starting to reach into the mid-hundreds now. And fundamentally the developers who make them don’t understand how they work.

Could this be fixed by adjusting how tickets are scoped?

chocolatemario• 12 months ago

This just sounds like a low quality bar or PRs that are too wide in large in scope for AI. In any case, it sounds like taking a single stab at it with an LLM and calling it good. I’m not really AI for everything type of dev, but there are some tasks that AI excels at. If you’re doing it for feature work on a high churn product without a tight grip on the reins, I fear for your products future.

ratelimitsteve• 12 months ago

I’ll ask them something about the design and they’ll reply: “IDK Claude did that.”

I would want someone entirely off of my team if they did that. Anyone who pushes code they don't understand at least well enough to answer "What does that do?" and "Why did you do it that way?" deserves for their PR to be flat out rejected in whole, not just altered.

rafaelmn• 12 months ago

I've seen the worst impact on mid/junior level devs. Where they would have to struggle through a problem before - AI is like a magic shortcut to something that looks like it works. And then they submit that crap and I can't trust them again - they will give me AI code without even understanding what it does fully. It robbed them of the learning process and made them even less useful, while making it seem to them they were achieving something. I'm seeing these kinds of people getting removed from workforce fast - you can probably prompt the AI better on your own, have one less layer of indirection and it will be faster.

danielmarkbruce4• 12 months ago

Exactly this. In the right hands the outputs from LLMs are amazing. Not always right, but can be checked. In the wrong hands they are worse than useless because they cannot be checked.

nlawalker• 12 months ago

I’ll ask them something about the design and they’ll reply: “IDK Claude did that.”

"Then your job is to go ask Claude and get back to me. On that note, if that's what I'm paying you for now, I might be paying you too much..."

I'm really interested to see how the intersection of AI and accountability develops over the next few years. It seems like everyone's primary job will effectively be taking accountability for the AI they're driving, and the pay will be a function of how much and what kind of accountability you're taking and the overall stakes.

moritzwarhier• 12 months ago

I hope so, in reality, people who review code are not always the superiors of the other party :)

Not meaning to put on a holier-than-thou hat here. But I hated this many times already. E.g. having to approve code that contains useless comments that were clearly generated by AI, but on the other hand, it's nitpicking to bring it up during review...

If my colleagues would do that more often and for more parts of the code, that's where I really start getting inclined to look for a new job.

SatvikBeri• 12 months ago

A new coworker solved a problem that we'd basically been unable to fix for 2 years, and we were relying on workarounds. This was especially impressive because it was totally outside his expertise. When I asked how he did it, a big part of his process was using LLMs.

For the most part, I've noticed my LLM-using coworkers producing better PRs, but I haven't noticed anyone producing more.

subarctic• 12 months ago

That's the thing, there's a big difference between using AI to help you solve a problem and using it to write code that you don't understand (and not take the time to understand it). It would suck to be reviewing someone else's PR and find out you're putting more effort into understanding their code than they did. But these are powerful tools and they're not going away anytime soon

josefritzishere• 12 months ago

I too have seen anecdotes that people "feel" more productive. But science says that they're 19% less productive. I'm going to go with science on this one.

vouaobrasil10• 12 months ago

Further, the problem with the word "productive" is that it's often measured in quantity and speed, not quality.

davely• 12 months ago

The study that said devs were 19% less productive was flawed in a number of ways: small sample size, poorly chosen tasks, no prior training on AI tools.

The science is by no means conclusive. A joint Harvard / MIT study found developers completed tasks up to 50% faster [0]!

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06590

snitzr• 12 months ago

I feel like the only thing propping up the US economy right now is AI hype.

leptons4• 12 months ago

"AI" is sucking up all the investment money, so unless you are working in "AI", you aren't likely to get funding. It's hurting the economy more than helping.

xwowsersx• 12 months ago

Well, a few things to consider:

Investment capital isn't zero-sum...if/when AI generates outsized/large returns, it actually brings more money into the entire VC ecosystem. LPs who 10x their AI investments don't exactly hoard that cash, they reinvest and often diversify into other sectors.

Every major tech wave creates huge downstream opportunities. The internet "bubble" didn't just benefit search engines...it spawned e-com, SaaS, fintech, etc. AI is doing the same thing with robotics, new semiconductors, data infrastructure, and I'm sure other categories that don't even exist yet.

Also investors know they need portfolio diversification. Even AI-focused VCs are actively looking for contrarian bets in undervalued sectors precisely because there's less competition there right now.

Plus, AI advancement should (yes, I know there's hype and theses that may not play out) accelerate innovation everywhere else. Example: A biotech startup today has access to AI tools that were Google-only five years ago. This makes non-AI startups more attractive, not less.

We saw identical complaints during the dotcom era about "real businesses" getting ignored, but that period actualy coincided with growth across enterprise software, telco, and tons of other sectors.

kachapopopow4• 12 months ago

AI has allowed me to work on projects I was simply too lazy or haven't attached any importance to. It also allows me to skip the entire process of contacting a designer or doing design work myself (which might actually be a bad thing). The thing I know for sure is that none of my smart home additions I had sitting in a box would be finished if AI didn't exist.

SoftTalker3• 12 months ago

If they were so unimportant why do them at all?

It's like buying a trinket just because it's cheap. It's still ultimately wasteful.

kachapopopow4• 12 months ago

Because, why not, just because I don't attach importance doesn't mean they don't make my life or those around me more convenient. It's just a good motivation tool in general.

Also if you buy an ultimately useless trinket, well that's just life. Everything we do can be considered 'ultimately' useless.

bityard3• 12 months ago

I'm not who you are responding to, but I do similar things with AI.

Think about it this way. We all make decisions like this pretty much every day, but I am especially careful with them in my personal life where time is limited and sacred: "What amount of time or money (X) am I willing to spend to get something (Y)?"

There have been many times that X has been "too much," until I later discover some new tool, library, or technique (or simply a price drop) that reduces X below the threshold of pulling the trigger. AI is that new tool for a lot of people and contexts.

If my barrier to some cool new one-off home automation feature is something like, "I would need to know Ruby but I don't know it and don't have time or desire to learn it," then I can have an LLM do the heavy lifting in a tiny fraction of the time it would take me to learn. Of course the feature needs to be something straightforward enough for the LLM to handle, and you have to be able to test it. And it goes without saying that since I can't properly review the code, I wouldn't use it for something that could cause a lot of damage or a security issue. But there are lots of tools/areas where that is not applicable. (Not all code needs to be bullet-proof and in reality, almost none of it is, even when it should be.)

GaggiX• 12 months ago

This is another article based on the study that had a population of 16 people, most of which never used the tool before.

Edit: "amirhirsch" user probably explained this better than me in an above comment.

randysalami• 12 months ago

Work harder, create datapoints, democratize knowledge. Except that knowledge will be confined eventually and doom the futures of many people. Use AI now to get ahead of your peers by feeding it questions and evaluating responses. Then in 10 years, Insert Field Here will be dominated by models trained by yesterday’s experts. New members of the field will not be able to compete with the collective knowledge of 1000s of their predecessors. Selling the futures of our youth for short-term gains. It’s quite sad and it is what’s happening.

It’s a shame too because it really could have been something so much more amazing. I’d imagine higher education would shift to how it used to be: a past-time for bored elites. We would probably see a large reduction in the middle class and its eventual destruction. First they went for manufacturing with its strong unions, now they go for the white-collar worker who has little solidarity for his common man (see lack of unions and ethics in our STEM field; most likely because we thought we could never be made redundant). Field by field the middle class will be destroyed and the lower class in thrall of addictive social media, substances, and the illusion of selection into the influencer petty-elite (which remain compliant because they don’t offer value proportional to the bribes they receive). The elites will have recreated the dynamic that existed for most of human history. Final point, see the obsession of current elites in using artificial insemination to create a reliable and durable contingent of heirs. Something previous rulers could only dream about in history.

It disgusts me and pisses me off so much.

amirhirsch• 12 months ago

The blogosphere (am I dating myself?) keeps bringing up the METR study (https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...) without really understanding the result. The guy with experience had a huge boost. You are reading the results wrong if your conclusion is this blog.

And that was before Claude Code.

georgeburdell• 12 months ago

The article itself mentions the J-shaped curve (sacrifice productivity now while you learn the tools, then gain that and more later on). It’s really just poor (or perhaps AI) writing

kebman• 12 months ago

Here's the kicker: AI was supposed to automate the boring parts so we could “focus on high-leverage, strategic, needle-moving, synergistic core competencies.” Instead, we’re stuck in a recursive loop of prompt engineering, hallucination triage, output validation, re-prompting, Slack channel FOMO, and productivity theater. We’ve basically replaced “doing the work” with “managing the tool that kinda tries to do the work but needs babysitting.” Congrats—we’ve invented Jira for thought. And here's the kicker.

throwawaysleep4• 12 months ago

Or we are all just dev leads now managing junior dev swarms.

leptons4• 12 months ago

Those "junior dev swarms" will never become seniors, so you're perpetually handholding and always getting junior-dev results. It isn't a step forward in any way.

vouaobrasil10• 12 months ago

AI was never supposed to automate the boring parts. It's what it was advertised to do. Sort of like how those "as seen on TV" weight loss pills are "supposed" to help you lose weight.

The purpose of AI is supposed to *make a few people richer*! Not take away the boredom from tasks. That's only a side effect of it used to sell it.

tdiff• 12 months ago

Unfortunately, most devs are not working on “high-leverage, strategic, needle-moving, synergistic core” things not because they don't have time to.

vasco2• 12 months ago

I've created hundreds of small scripts that I wouldn't have bothered with before and either do some manual checks or just not possess the information. Just on "small script" productivity it already saved me a lot of time.

The problem is people trying to make the models do things that are too close to their limit. You should use LLMs for things they can ace already, not waste time trying to get it to invent some new algorithm. If I don't 0-3 shot a problem then I will just either do it manually or not do it.

Similarly to giving up on a Google search that you try a few times and nothing useful comes in the first few prompts. You don't keep at it the whole afternoon.

paulcole• 12 months ago

I'm in a similar same boat as you.

I'm not a programmer but from time to time would make automations or small scripts to make my job easier.

LLMs have made much more complex automations and scripts possible while making it dead simple to create the scripts I used to make.

timeinput• 12 months ago

Agreed, and after you've worked with them for a bit you can start to predict where they are going to fail, and do something silly like delete your code base, or have no trouble, and succeed, and add that feature you were after.

A good code review and edit to remove the excess verbosity, and you got a feature done real fast.

Ask it for something at or above its limit then the code is very difficult to debug, difficult to understand has potentially misleading comments, and more. Knowing how to work with these overly confident coworkers is definitely a skill. I feel it varies from significantly from model to model as well.

Its often difficult to task other programmers with tasks at or above their limits too.

gspencley• 12 months ago

Yeah I'm not an AI naysayer but was pretty skeptical that AI could actually do anything for my workflow.

Tedious, repetitive stuff that you'd typically write a throwaway script for is one good use case for AI for me. This doesn't come up very often for me, however. But this morning I needed to update a bunch of import statements in TypeScript files to use relative paths instead of referencing a library name and Cursor did that for me quickly and easily without me needing to write a script.

I've also found that if you're unsure how to solve a problem within an existing codebase, or you're about to go down a rabbit hole of studying documentation to figure out how to wire something up, an LLM can get you up and running with code examples a bit quicker.

But if I already know, high level, how I'm going to solve something then the whole "needing to review the AI code" part of the workflow more than eats up any time savings. And the parallelism thing is just a ton of context shifting to me. Each time I need to go back to an agent to review what it did, it takes me away from the deep focus on a domain problem that I was focused on, and there's a good 20 - 30 minutes of productivity lost by switching back and forth between just two tasks.

lucianbr2• 12 months ago

The problem is people trying to make the models do things that are too close to their limit.

As advertised or at least strongly implied by the companies that own the models.

vasco2• 12 months ago

The shampoo company also tells you to apply twice, you don't have to believe them.

pfisherman2• 12 months ago

But here’s the kicker: we were told AI would free us up for “higher-level work.” What actually happened? We just found more work to fill the space. That two-hour block AI created by automating your morning reports? It’s now packed with three new meetings. The 30 minutes you saved on data analysis? You’re using it to manage two more AI tools and review their outputs.

This is basically the definition of increased productivity and efficiency. Doing more stuff in the same amount of time. What I tell people who are anxious about whether their job might be automated away by AI is this:

We will never run out of the problems that need solving. The types of problems you spend your time solving will change. The key is to adapt your process to allocate your time to solving the right kinds of problems. You don’t want the be the person taking an hour to do arithmetic by hand, when you have access to spreadsheets.

marknutter• 12 months ago

We will never run out of the problems that need solving. The types of problems you spend your time solving will change. The key is to adapt your process to allocate your time to solving the right kinds of problems. You don’t want the be the person taking an hour to do arithmetic by hand, when you have access to spreadsheets.

And this has always been the case throughout all of human history.

pftburger• 12 months ago

AI efficiency gains don’t benefit employees, they benefit _employers_, who get more output from the same salary. When you’re salaried, you’re selling 8 hours of time, not units of work. AI that makes you 20% faster doesn’t mean you work 20% fewer hours or get a 20% raise. It means your employer gets 20% more value from the same labor cost.

Marx: workers sell their capacity to work for a fixed period, and any productivity improvements within that time become surplus value captured by capital.

AI tools are just the latest mechanism for extracting more output from the same wage. The real issue isn’t the technology—it’s that employees can’t capture gains from their own efficiency improvements. Until compensation models shift from time-based to outcome-based, every productivity breakthrough just makes us more profitable to employ, not more prosperous ourselves.

It’s the Industrial Revolution all over again and we’re the Luddites

Herring2• 12 months ago

American workers don't care about "socialism". Look who they elected president. He won the popular vote.

Eventually they will be forced to care when things get bad enough -- and it's definitely trending that way fast [1]. But not today and not tomorrow.

[1] https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart

dragonwriter2• 12 months ago

AI efficiency gains don’t benefit employees—they benefit employers who get more output from the same salary.

So, they also benefit developers that become solopreneurs.

So they increase the next-best alternative for developers compared to work as employees.

What happens when you improve the next-best alternative?

AI tools are just the latest mechanism for extracting more output from the same wage.

The whole history of software development has been rapid introduction of additional automation (because no field has been more the focus of software development than itself), and looking at the history of developer salaries, that has not been a process of "extracting more output from the same wage". Yes, output per $ wage has gone up, but real wages per hour or day worked for developers have also gone up, and done so faster than wages across the economy generally. It is true and problematic that the degree of capitalism in the structure of the modern mixed economy means that the gains of productivity go disproportionately to capital, but it is simply false to say that they go exclusively to capital across the board, and it is particularly easy to see that this has specifically been false in the case of productivity gains from further automation in software development.

kinghajj• 12 months ago

any productivity improvements within that time become surplus value captured by capital.

Not quite right. Total Value remains the same before and after increase in productivity, assuming the labor force remains constant. But more use-value is created in the same period of time.

At the beginning, this is good for the employer, because the new socially necessary labor time has not been internalized, so the output can be sold for a price corresponding to its old Value. Maybe a bit less, to undercut competitors.

Eventually though, as competition adopts the new technique, everyone attempts to undercut each other’s prices, adjusting until prices correspond to the new Value.

esafak2• 12 months ago

Come on, what did you think was going to happen? The historical record has consistently shown that humans have not worked less when given tools that increased productivity; they simply produced more.

This is what the whole four-day workweek movement is about; to reclaim some of that productivity increase as personal time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-day_workweek

Economist Keynes predicted one century ago that the workweek would drop to 15 hours due to rising productivity. It has not happened for social reasons.

I don't know what's going to happen when humans become redundant; that's an incipient issue we'll have to grapple with.

SoftTalker3• 12 months ago

Humans will probably be cheaper than machines for a long time for some things. They reproduce themselves, they self-repair (up to a point), they are quite dexterous, they can be powered fairly cheaply by stuff that grows out of the earth, and they learn by example without explicit programming. They will do the menial but deceptively demanding of high dexterity tasks that need to be done. Laundry, dishes, housecleaning. New construction will largely be done by machines but repairs are more unpredictable so human mechanics, plumbers, etc. will continue to be in demand.

Software development as a career will evaporate in the next decade, as will most "knowledge" work such as general medicine, law, and teaching. Surgeons and dentists will continue a bit longer.

Bottom line, most of us will be doing chores while the machines do all the production and creative work.

esafak2• 12 months ago

I don't think people in democratic societies will stand for being reduced to errand runners; they will vote for governments that promise them relief. And even those chores will be done by robots. A new social contract will be demanded.

darth_avocado• 12 months ago

AI is bringing efficiency, and it is making us work harder. It’s because AI marginally improves certain workflows but the management is using that to fire employees and offload their work on the remaining ones. You get 1.2x improvement in efficiency but get 2x the work.

turnsout• 12 months ago

It was ever thus. In each technological revolution—from the Industrial Revolution to personal computing revolution—the promise is that the technology will make work so efficient and productive that we can all work less.

Unfortunately, it is always a deliberate lie by the people who stand to gain from the new technology. Anyone who has thought about it for five seconds knows that this is not how capitalism works. Productivity gains are almost immediately absorbed and become the new normal. Firms that operate at the old level of productivity get washed out.

I simply can't believe that we're still falling for this. But let's hold out hope. Maybe AGI is just around the corner, and literally everyone in the world will spend our time sipping margaritas on the beach while we count our UBI. Certainly AI could never accelerate wealth concentration and inequality, right? RIGHT?

isoprophlex• 12 months ago

At least AI gave the author an easy think piece without having to write anything in their own style.

"But here's the kicker"

"It's not x. It's y."

"The companies that foo? They bar."

Em-dashes galore.

I'm either hypersensitized, seeing ghosts, or this article got the "yo claude make it pop" treatment. It's sad, but anything overly polished immediately triggers some "is this slop or an original thought actually worth my time" response.

nathan_compton2• 12 months ago

I find music from the late 80s and 90s almost unlistenable, as digital audio processing created a very samey sound for everything. I think its instructive that even the iconoclastic Devo produced absolute dogshit sounding recordings from this era.

New technology often homogenizes and makes things boring for awhile.

bko• 12 months ago

I don't get these articles. First the author claims that AI made us more productive but now the time we saved is spent on more work (!)

But here’s the kicker: we were told AI would free us up for “higher-level work.” What actually happened? We just found more work to fill the space. That two-hour block AI created by automating your morning reports? It’s now packed with three new meetings.

But then a few sentences later, she argues that tools made us less productive.

when developers used AI tools, they took 19% longer to complete tasks than without AI. Even more telling: the developers estimated they were 20% faster with AI—they were completely wrong about their own productivity.

Then she switches back to saying it saves us time but cognitive debt!

If an AI tool saves you 30 minutes but leaves you mentally drained and second-guessing everything, that’s not productivity—that’s cognitive debt.

I think you have to pick one, or just admit you don't like AI because it makes you feel icky for whatever reason so you're going to throw every type of argument you can against it.

bsenftner• 12 months ago

It's sloppy click bait writing.

bityard3• 12 months ago

There was also no advice for the main problem posited in the first couple of paragraphs. That is, being asked to do more with less time.

The right answer to this is: speak up for yourself. Dumping your feelings into HN or Reddit or your blog can be a temporary coping mechanism but it doesn't solve the problem. If you are legitimately working your tail off and not able to keep up with your workload, tell your manager or clients. Tactfully, of course. If they won't listen, then its time to move on. There are reasonable people/companies to work with out there, but they sometimes take some effort to find.

vouaobrasil10• 12 months ago

I don't get these articles. First the author claims that AI made us more productive but now the time we saved is spent on more work (!)

Well, that is a general phenomenon of technology. Technology does indeed often save time at first (in the short-term) but then compensates in a bad way and gives us more work in the long term. Pretty much every technology past a certain point of sophistication does this:

- Smartphones immediately can help us organize stuff, but then they also make it easier for people to call you when you don't want, you get more spam, etc.

- Cars make it easier to get from A to B but then in the long run now we have to spend countless years of work to clean up the climate/environemtn

- Computers make typing and storing information more efficient but now we have to spend countless hours on securing them

The bottom line is that efficiency increases from a technological creation point of view but life simplicity decreases, in general.

downrightmike• 12 months ago

A doctor can review 50 xrays a day, AI comes in and flags one for re-review, the doctor now can only do 49 reviews a day.

nathan_compton2• 12 months ago

This isn't surprising to me. My experience is that AI is best suited for a single person to get started rapidly with a new project or, if used artfully, to quickly orchestrate refactoring that the user has planned. I've personally found AI to be good for my productivity (haven't measured, however, my work is not conducive to that kind of thing) but I've also found I use AI primarily to look up documentation and to type code out. I still think about software design as much as I ever have, whether its the initial design step or refactoring.

6gvONxR4sf7o• 12 months ago

We've had technological progress that rapidly shifts the number of person-hours per <output> for generations. We don't have to guess. We've seen this play out many times already.

At first, we spend our time one way (say eight hours, just to pick a number). Then we get the tools to do all of that in six hours. Then when job seeking and hiring, we get one worker willing to work six hours and another willing to work eight, so the eight-hour worker gets the job, all else equal. Labor is a marketplace, so we work as much as we're willing to in aggregate, which is roughly constant over time, so efficiency will never free up individuals' time.

In the context of TFA, it means we just shift our time to "harder" work (in the sense of work that AI can't do yet).

jgeada• 12 months ago

Only the the context of weak labor laws and no unions.

There are more workers than CEOs and CEOs don't create the value, the workers do. What CEOs largely do is monetize and take credit for all the value creation.

I don't think things can continue along the current unsustainable path in the US. Something will break; hopefully in a sensible way and not the historical pitchforks and arson.

nemesisithetic3• 12 months ago

Then when job seeking and hiring, we get one worker willing to work six hours and another willing to work eight, so the eight-hour worker gets the job, all else equal.

Do you think people get hired by bidding for number of hours they want to work?

Oras• 12 months ago

My experience with AI coding is it might be slower to develop for short term, but it’s saving ton of time for the long term.

Here is an example.

I decided to create a new app, so I write down a brief of what it should do, ask AI to create a longer readme file about the platform along with design, sequence diagram, and suggested technologies.

I review that document, see if there is anything I can amend, then ask AI for the implementation plan.

Up until this point, this would probably increased the time I usually use to describe the platform in writing. But realistically, designing and thinking about systems were never that fast. I would have to think about use cases, imagine workflows in my mind, do pen and paper diagrams which I don’t think any of the productivity reports are covering.

firefoxd• 12 months ago

In my team, it's making one dev more prolific, and everybody else work harder.

The most junior dev on my team was tasked with setting up a repo for a new service. The service is not due for many many months so this was an opportunity to learn. What we got was a giant PR with hundreds of new configurations no one has heard of. It's not bad, it's just that we don't know what each conf does. Naturally we asked him to explain or give an overview, he couldn't. Well because he fed the whole thing to an LLM and it spat out the repo. He even had fixes for bugs we didn't know we had in other repos. He didn't know either. But it took the rest of the team digging in to figure out what's going on.

I'm not against using LLM, but now I've added a new step in the process. If anyone makes giant PRs, they'll also have to make a presentation to give everyone an overview. With that in mind, it forces devs to actually read through the code they generate and understand it.

vkou2• 12 months ago

I think the simpler expectation here is the same one you should have for non-AI code.

Don't allow giant PRs without a damn good reason for them. Incremental steps, with testing (automated or human) to verify their correctness, that take you from a known-good-to-known-good state.

soiltype• 12 months ago

sic semper operarius.

you will never be given your time back by an employer. you have to take it. you might be able to ask for it, but it won't be freely given, whether or not you become more efficient. LLM chatbots and agents are, in this sense, just another tool that changes our relationship to the work we do (but never our relationship to work).

mmanfrin• 12 months ago

Modern cotton gin.

ubicomp• 12 months ago

Just like with "automatic checkout systems" at a grocery store. Passing the labor onto the individual, vs. the expert. We don't even get the same infrastructure professionals get. A PLU for a piece of fruit is a mind-blurring whisk of hands over a dial pad for a pro, and a bit of mind-numbingly arduously piss-poor series of taps for the ill-positioned entrant.

tcrow• 12 months ago

This is admittedly much easier with greenfield projects, but if you can keep the AI focused on tight, modular development, meeting service specs, and not have the AI try to address cross-cutting concerns, you get much better outcomes. It does put more responsibility on humans for proper design and specification, but if you are willing to do that work, the AI can really assist in the raw development aspect during implementation.

FrustratedMonky• 12 months ago

From AI

"While the cotton gin made the process of cleaning cotton significantly faster, it ultimately led to an increase in the demand for enslaved labor, not a decrease."

A lot of automation leads to more work for someone. Reduces some jobs, and piles on others. Maybe 12 union jobs are removed, but then keeping the robots running falls on 1-2 IT staff.

hintymad• 12 months ago

But here’s the kicker: we were told AI would free us up for “higher-level work.” What actually happened? We just found more work to fill the space. That two-hour block AI created by automating your morning reports? It’s now packed with three new meetings. The 30 minutes you saved on data analysis? You’re using it to manage two more AI tools and review their outputs

I'm not sure if this is caused by AI, or by the nature of business or the culture of many companies. Replacing AI with any automations, wouldn't it be the same result?

vouaobrasil10• 12 months ago

It's a two-way street: technologies tend to create power imbalances and that in turn creates culture over a long term, especially if innovation also becomes central to culture.

yzhong94• 12 months ago

The time saved just goes to TikTok / Reddit / Instagram etc. There's plenty of time wasted waiting for the AI to finish working

agile-gift0262• 12 months ago

I only know that my time tracker says that now I spend 9 times longer reviewing MRs from some of my senior colleagues than what I did before. I'm not sure the company is realising that the tens of thousands of dollars it's spending on Claude and Gemini are making some of their 6-figure (in Europe) senior developers produce code that's worse than the one most of the juniors produce.

satisfice• 12 months ago

I don’t using fucking AI for my emails. I don’t use it to summarize anything. Hire me if you want real work instead bullshit and slop.

AI promised efficiency. Instead, it's making us work harder

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